The individual, communication, and society: essays in memory of Gregory Bateson. Rieber, Robert, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 343 p.in
New Ideas in Psychology 10: 95-6
Bateson remains famous for his ex-centricity within the disciplines that are concerned with the human in humanity. This probably has something to do with his popularity among those who search for ex-centers to ground their own work. There is however--and perhaps not surprisingly--an eccentricity to Bateson's eccentricity that brings him back to a center that he helped move: Bateson always presented himself as, above all else, a scientist and he was fascinated by the most scientificky of modern developments in the social sciences, specifically system theory which was developed out of the need to develop "smarter" bombs during WWII, contributed to the development of modern computers, and led to even smarter bombs.
Bateson himself, of course, did not develop bombs but he remained a scientist, that is somehow dedicated to careful observation, description, and experimentation. His complaints against the human sciences as he found them, and as they remained, and may still be, were in the name of furthering science. They were not a complaint against the possibility of science, that is of an activity which, through specific human (cultural) manipulations of the world of which the community of scientists is an integral part, produces something that will move humanity along new, and altogether "better," paths. To label this something "knowledge," or to talk about the goal of science as "understanding," may not be useful in our current discourse. Science may produce something else than knowledge or understanding. It remains a separate activity which Bateson never renounced.
I started this review with these general considerations because the papers in this collection of essays "in the memory of" Bateson, are rather spectacular displays of activities which it is doubtful Bateson would have recognized as the kind of science which he called for. The operative word here may be "essays," and I may be wrong in having looked for something else, that is for displays of what I know some other students of Bateson are in fact conducting. The closest thing to a determined look at a corpus of material and to its manipulation may be Broughton's paper on collective dreams about computers. At the other extreme is Rieber et al's paper describing an experiment who "guaranteed the validity and reliability of subject responses" by "detailed instructions, illustrations, exercises" before the questionnaire was given and "eliminating from the final analysis those subjects with many omissions or obvious response sets." I suspect Bateson--to the extent that he was interested in learning theory--would have been most interested in the instruction part of the experiment, and--to the extent that they suggest a "failure" of some sort--in those subjects who produced responses that did not fit. In between, and perhaps typical of the shift from the naturalist's puzzlement to the experimenter's cross-classifications, may be Freedman's paper on "communicative functioning." Freedman starts with some of Bateson's greatest insight into human behavior--the recognition that movement cannot be separated from speech and that speaker cannot be separated from interlocutor. Freedman then proceeds to report on analyses that classify individuals ("field-dependent" vs. "field-independent") and claims these are personal differences (Freedman might have read Skolnick's paper in the collection which simply reviews Bateson's "concept of mental illness"--a misnomer probably--, and correctly stresses the primacy of interaction).
Most of the papers indeed belong to the familiar experimental paradigms. There is no eccentricity here and, one fears, little science in Bateson's sense. Quite eccentric, but in a direction that takes us even further from science, are the introductory and concluding essays caricatured in Oswald's "heavenly discourse" between Bateson and Oscar Wilde (don't laugh!). Very well contextualized such postmodern experiments (if this is what it is) may still prove useful. In this case the exercise appears self-indulgent. Bateson did publish many "metalogue" that were already experiments in theoretical argumentation, but it is not clear that we should try too hard to emulate him here. One needs genius to pull these off, and I am not sure that Oswald has gotten there.
There are many, in the behavioral sciences who remain uncertain about the value of Bateson's legacy. I fear this book will do nothing to demonstrate that his eccentricity actually moved various traditions of scientific inquiry into exciting directions that some are indeed continuing to explore. It is just too bad that none of them were asked to contribute.